The Sunday Morning Report

Okay, it's not much of a report--Sue me.

You know what's funny? Time and time again people have said how the tiniest little thing can bring the biggest thing down. There have been countless anecdotes, tales, and legends of instances where that has taken place. They'll say how a multi-million dollar NASCAR race can be lost by the failure of a 5-cent part. Well, it's true.

I recently explained how our high-speed press at work had finished it's job--How it's "day in the sun" had finally come to an end. Well, after all the products it makes had been washed and packaged, we were able to get an exact count on things and we determined that we needed to fire up the press again and run out just three more coils worth of raw material through it (about 120,000 parts). That's fine--We had until February to get them out, so it was something I could use as "space filler" when I had nothing else to do. Well, Friday I got the whole thing all set up to go. Material loaded and advanced all the way to the end of the press to where finished parts were visible at the exit of the die. All this is done at "inch mode" which means each time you press the buttons it cycles through. I was ready to go on full automatic, but before I did I had to set up the test fixture. We can't just run parts without knowing that they are within specifications right? We have to continually monitor them as the press is running by snagging a couple of them out of the exit chute every few minutes and clamping them into the test fixture.

The test fixture is comprised of five exact-placed dial indicators that read off the measurements of a freshly-manufactured part that we clamp into it. Before we can do that however, the gauges have to be set at nominal zero. To do that we have an exact-measurement block that has been made for that purpose that we clamp into place, then zero each gauge while that block is in place.

The block was gone.

We looked everywhere for it. There is no way it would have walked off on its own, and it would not have been used for any other purpose. After several hours of looking, we determined that the former operator of the press who was let go a few weeks back must have had something to do with it. While I'm sure he didn't steal it, it would have been very easy for him to just casually walk by any metal recycle bin or trash can in the building and drop it in. The bottom line: Without that block we can't run parts. After we gave up on ever finding it, we instead dug through CAD drawings for it. Now we've got our tooling guys painstakingly making us another one. And all that for only 3 coils of material (translation: About 6 hours of total run time). Oh well, at least we've got lots of time.

I took Teresa and Sarah out yesterday to exchange a couple shirts that Sarah bought me for Christmas. Sure, I know Teresa actually bought them, but Sarah picked them out. They are both of the heavyweight "outerwear" variety--One of them with a quilted lining and the other not. Both were size large instead of medium. Rather than me trying to exchange them with no receipt, I offered to drive them around to the right stores and get them exchanged. That also afforded me the opportunity to select colors that I liked. Win-win eh? After we got back to town I bought us all some burgers for lunch, and then delivered them back to their house. The rest of my day was spent not doing much. I did go out and do some troubleshooting on my truck again. I have determined that I have a major electrical problem somewhere--Most probably at a plug. I just have to find it.

It's been stormy as hell all night, and today will probably be more of the same. That's okay--I need to get some laundry and vacuuming done.

Yeah, today will be a good day to just stay in and put on my french maid apron...